As part of the 2018 Middleham Celebrates Richard III weekend a service in honour of King Richard will now include a tribute to Dr John Ashdown-Hill who sadly passed away on Friday 18 May. John was a friend and supporter of the Middleham Festival and gave talks at both the 2016 and 2017 festivals. John, in fact, made his final public appearance at last year’s event, and so it is particularly appropriate that we remember him in a church known both to King Richard and to John himself.

Dr Ashdown-Hill, a leading expert on Richard III and the Wars of the Roses, and a key member of Philippa Langley’s Looking For Richard Project that discovered Richard III in a car park in Leicester, has today revealed that the ‘bones in the urn’ in Westminster Abbey, believed for centuries by traditional historians to be those of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, apparently have no blood relationship to King Richard III.

The dental record reveals that Richard III had no congenitally missing teeth, in sharp contrast to the ‘bones in the urn’, where both skulls are said to present this genetic anomaly.

Previously it has been argued that this feature provided strong evidence of the royal identity of the ‘bones in the urn’.

It was claimed that the ‘Princes’ inherited their missing teeth from their grandmother, Cecily, Duchess of York.

But Dr Ashdown-Hill’s latest discovery strongly suggests that the ‘bones in the urn’ are not related to Cecily’s son, Richard III, who was a first degree relative of the ‘Princes’.

Scientific studies of hypodontia (congenitally missing teeth) have further suggested that the anomaly is relatively rare, being present in less than 5% of the population, and is slightly more prevalent in the female population.

This discovery adds further weight to the many questions now surrounding the identity of the ‘bones in the urn’, and raises the possibility that the remains may even be those of as yet unidentified females.

In 1674, the bones were discovered at the Tower of London by workmen digging ten feet below the stairs that led from the Royal Apartments to the White Tower.

Four years later, they were reburied in the urn in Westminster Abbey by Charles II who had been persuaded to accept that the remains were the ‘Princes in the Tower’.

The story of a stair burial for the ‘Princes’ had been proposed in the 16th century by Thomas More. However, in his account, now generally discredited by academia as a dramatic narrative, More went on to say that the bodies were removed from the stair burial and taken elsewhere.

What caused the four-year delay in the reburial of the bones in Westminster during the reign of Charles II, where the bones were kept during this time, and if they are indeed the same bones that were discovered in 1674 by the workmen, is also not known.

Dr Ashdown-Hill states,

This newly-revealed dental evidence is another remarkable discovery from the results of the Looking For Richard Project. Modern scientific analysis applied to the flawed 1933 investigation of the ‘bones in the urn’ has revealed that the sex and historical period of death of the remains is unknown. My latest discovery now casts doubts on the dental claims put forward in 1934, 1965 and 1987. Nor can we be sure that there are just two sets of bones within the urn. It used to be thought that there were two sets of bones in the Clarence vault at Tewkesbury Abbey, where Richard III’s brother was buried. But when I had those remains re-examined in 2013 it emerged that there were three or possibly four individuals present – information published by The History Press in my book The Third Plantagenet. The only way we will ever truly be able to answer all the questions about the ‘bones in the urn’ is, of course, either by further archival discoveries, or scientific analysis.

He also states,

I’m very excited about this new, updated edition of my work on Eleanor Talbot, published by The History Press. The book includes a remarkable new facial reconstruction of Eleanor’s putative remains, produced by experts at the University of Dundee. It also contains important new dental evidence in respect of Eleanor’s putative remains, provides evidence of when and where she could have married Edward IV, and offers two new theories for what may have caused her early demise.

Philippa Langley of the Looking For Richard Project states,

By discovering Richard III, the Looking For Richard Project succeeded in demolishing so many of the myths surrounding this much maligned monarch. We dared to question where others merely repeated. Indeed, by questioning the age-old story of the ‘bones in the river’ we succeeded in finding the king. Now it’s been revealed that the remains we found in Leicester question the received wisdom and dogma surrounding the disappearance of the sons of Edward IV. This exciting new discovery by Dr Ashdown-Hill is another step forward in our quest for knowledge, so that one day we may be able to uncover the truth about one of our most enduring historical mysteries. The search continues.

John Ashdown-Hill is a freelance historian and a bestselling author with a PhD in history. He regularly presents his research, and has achieved an excellent reputation in late medieval history. A Channel Four TV documentary was partially based upon Ashdown-Hill’s DNA research in The Last Days of Richard III. In 2015, Philippa Langley and Dr Ashdown-Hill were awarded MBEs by HM The Queen for their work in the discovery and identification of Richard III.

Published Works

The Secret Queen: Eleanor, the Woman Who Put Richard III on the Throne (The History Press, 2009, 2010, updated new edition in2016)

The Dublin King: The True Story of Edward, Earl of Warwick, Lambert Simnel, and the ‘Princes in the Tower’ (The History Press, 2015)

The Mythology of Richard III (Amberley, 2015)

The Wars of the Roses (Amberley, 2015)

The Third Plantagenet: George, Duke of Clarence, Richard III’s Brother (The History Press, 2014)

The Last Days of Richard III (The History Press, 2010, 2011, second updated edition 2013)